Jev, an AI for making quick decisions, has been a viral hit in Silicon Valley. But OpenAI is hot on its heels

Jev, an AI model built for quick decisions, went viral among AI developers and Silicon Valley cognoscenti when the startup TypeSafe AI released it in September.

These early adopters were quick to experiment with the AI model, which could perform all kinds of classification decisions—like sorting online customers into buckets based on certain data points or categorizing documents—at a fraction of the cost of many leading AI models.

Programmers showed it sorting email, spotting writing mistakes and even playing games.

Within a day of arriving on Vercel’s AI Gateway, a service for accessing different models, nearly 13% of its paid teams had tried Jev.

Vercel said Jev reached more than twice as many paid teams in its first 24 hours as any previous model launch.

Perhaps the clearest sign that TypeSafe was on to something: on Oct.

6, just three weeks after Jev’s launch, OpenAI rolled out a competing product, called Decisions API .

These services are competing to make AI practical for the thousands of routine judgments businesses might want to automate each day.

At that volume, small differences in cost, speed and error rates can change whether automating a task is worthwhile.

TypeSafe trained Jev specifically for this work.

OpenAI’s Decisions API uses GPT-6 Luna, an existing model in its lineup.

An AI model that skips the prose TypeSafe CEO Diogo Almeida told Fortune he began thinking about Jev after helping develop the technology behind ChatGPT at OpenAI.

Almeida saw a gap between models’ ability to answer people’s questions and their usefulness in automating routine work.

Almeida said he wanted to address AI’s “massive over-promise under-deliver issue” and avert an “AI winter.” “Building a company just happened to be the most effective way to do that,” he said.